Examining the sources of excess return predictability: Stochastic volatility or market inefficiency?

Essays on Return Predictability and Volatility Estimation

of the Dissertation Essays on Return Predictability and Volatility Estimation

Excess Volatility? The Australian Stock Market

Are share markets too volatile? While it is difficult to ignore share market volatility it is important to determine whether volatility is excessive. This paper replicates the Shiller (1981) test as well as applying standard time series analysis to annual Australian stock market data for the period 1883 to 1999. While Shiller’s test suggests the possibility of excess volatility, time series ana...

Financial Economics, Return Predictability and Market Efficiency

Market Closure , Liquidity Premia , and Return Predictability ∗

In his seminal work, Constantinides (1986) finds that transaction cost has only a second order effect on liquidity premia. In this paper, we show that incorporating the well-established time-varying return dynamics across trading and nontrading periods can produce a first order effect that is much greater than that found by the existing literature and comparable to empirical evidence. Surprisin...

Commodity Market Interest and Asset Return Predictability ∗

We establish several new findings on the relation between open interest in commodity markets and asset returns. High commodity market activity, as measured by high open-interest growth, predicts high commodity returns and low bond returns. Openinterest growth is a more powerful and robust predictor of commodity returns than other known predictors such as the short rate, the yield spread, the ba...